IBM Lotus - This last 2 weeks

Originally i started writing a comment in Volker site and since it was slightly bigger i wrote a separate blog entry itself
It started with Volker in his typical way followed by Jake and John Vaughan. I read through almost each of the comments and it was definitely enlightening to go through each of it and how each one of us perceive about Notes software and i must say i thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have made comments on Jake's blog and from then on to read all the rest of the comments took a long time and digest. Every now and then Lotus community face this sort of discussion and i remember once i too have written along these lines in the past.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2006/02/laug-1st-meeting.html
Each time, i want to write comments in Volker site, there is whole lot of things running in mind and don't know exactly how to write about. That's what writing experience is all about. If you start writing on a daily basis, your writing will get polished and you know exactly what needs to be communicated and to be able to do that with just few words yet powerful. IMO, that's why Volker is able to sum up in a nice way and others like me think but whole lots of things comes to mind and stop and then again lots of things comes to mind while you sleep etc.
Before i start i have to say "I just love IBM". Even though i have never worked there, i am just attracted by Big Blue IBM. I get excited every time i hear that IBM makes software for big corporations and they are massively scalable and nothing comes close and simply not comparable to other vendors. They have just about everything for a big company to be their customer and even smaller ones. Am bought by the IBM brand much earlier somehow.
After i completed my Engineering i was selected in a campus interview to join a IT services company and it was there i was first introduced to Lotus Notes R4.5 in the year 1998. In my team we were 12 trainees who started reading through Lotus Notes CBT and were given training on the platform by our senior employees in the team. And it's about 12 years now. All this while, i have been working in Notes and Domino and until 2006 its very much Lotus Notes, Lotus Domino, LDDM, Lotus Workflow.
After that, the market started slowly dipping in SG for Notes. Not much new development in Notes. Singapore Gov is a very big customer of Notes and every Ministry, Stat boards, and Agencies associated with Government uses Notes for Email. Not only for mail and plenty of applications in Notes and lots of services company has made huge money until one day the Gov said: We are going to standardise our operating environment (SOE) and the following are the software that will be available in each of the civil servant desktop and the list doesn't include Lotus Notes. It's a massive deal SGD 1.5 billion (atleast from outside it looks so). The consortium that won the deal includes Microsoft who are the key software supplier. And that means, its Exchange over Domino for mail. And the project has officially started in the year 2007 and its still on going. Not sure how successful will be but analyst like Gartner predicted it will not yield much gains though.
http://senthilkumars.blogspot.com/2010/04/soeasy-is-not-so-easy.html
Anyways for people who built their skills around Notes and Domino, they have to move on and in my case, out of 12 people in my team there was no one doing Notes except me at that point in time (team mates were smart and they changed careers am not repenting though) and i for one continued with IBM but its just that i shaped up skills in Presales and started in WebSphere Portal technologies and WCM. As a IT services company, it made a lot of sense to them that they can make more money in Portal and WCM rather than just Notes in which applications can be done usually 1/10th of the cost and even IBM reps were pushing for the Portal and WCM than Notes purely because they cannot add any new licenses in Notes and only by selling new licenses they reach their target. Because majority of the Notes systems are not very complex systems and usually 10 - 15 apps can be maintained by a developer and administrator, it's not visible to C-level management.
May be IBM should have delivered things like Lotus Connections in Domino platform as Nathan very rightly stated or i wonder why not a SharePoint like system is delivered in Domino platform. I just wonder, why IBM has not capitalised on a opportunity like this. They had 140 million seats during year 2004 or something and if they had polished Domino and built a system like Sharepoint on top of Domino wouldn't they have increased the business to double. IMO, Domino had everything what Sharepoint is doing today and i wonder what would have taken to built a system like that. May be IBM perception of collaboration was different and they wanted to make it more of a process centric rather than document centric.
Volker has asked a very genuine question why IBM has acquired Lotus in the first place and how Domino is perceived by other divisions of IBM. To find out answers, I digged through some of the interviews by Steve Mills to understand what can i make out from the statements. That has given me some broad level understanding. I will quote some of the items here
Excerpts from
http://www.information-age.com/channels/management-and-skills/features/313746/an-interview-with-steve-mills.thtml
IA: Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are building huge data centres across the US and Europe with a view to offering software-as- a-service, storage-as-a-service, email-as-a-service and more. They see themselves as the new large utility companies, delivering application services. So does IBM see that as something it would want to replicate?
SM: For the consumer, no. We have made it clear in the market that our orientation is not toward [the consumer]. It is not that we won’t help others serve the consumer, we are happy to do that, but we don’t want to be consumer facing. That is not our forte.
IA: Acquisitions have become a central part of IBM Software’s expansion strategy, and that has moved the portfolio up the stack from middleware and systems software into the applications layer, with FileNet and Cognos products. Can you give us an idea of whether there is a clear applications line that you do or do not want to cross?
SM: So I am the guy that makes these decisions, and [I can tell you] there is a clear line. However, the line is more related to an understanding of the ecosystems in which we participate.
Take FileNet as an example. Clearly, there are people who look at FileNet as an application. But most of the code, by weight, is infrastructure not application code, even though it has application-like characteristics.
He goes to say that
What this comes back to is that we are not afraid to deliver applications, but we are clearly very selective about where we do it. It is in spaces which are highly exploitative of infrastructure.
Even though this interview was done quite some time back, we can still see the mind set and we will have to definitely take this as voice of IBM. The above answers some of the questions that were asked by the Lotus community and that is IBM is not interested in consumer facing because that is not their forte and they are very much in to providing infrastructure software and services than applications.
That's why IBM never shows product in their marketing because they are not consumer oriented where as MS and Apple are.
And that's why IBM don't want to produce good looking and nicely polished UI because they are marketing to end users.
Their market segment and the areas of focus are very different from others and that's why IBM is hugely successful company and know what they are doing.
So if you are working with Lotus technologies it is expected that they may not carry a UI like Apples or Microsoft's and it's up to the consultant to build up nice UI's with the software because IBM is not selling to end users.
So to come to a conclusion, my take is as a consultant we can love a particular technology or product but still has to keep options open, we definitely have to pickup different skills and need to apply when it is needed. In my case since i love IBM, i managed to move to WebSphere Portal, WCM, OmniFind, along with LDDM, Quickplace/Quickr, Sametime etc. Besides development i also do presales and project management.
When i write this, in Singapore there is only a handful of Lotus Notes jobs and to be precise its only 5 from the job site and WebSphere Portal is also very less.
J2EE and .NET openings are quite a lot and nothing wrong in picking up .Net / J2EE and infact IBM wanted us all to know J2EE and if one fine day Domino is consumed by WebSphere which is their home grown and not acquired as in the case of Lotus, they don't want people to loose out jobs.
Ok now what, go back and think about what you could do  to make yourself more marketable. Learn Xpages or .NET? Am going to learn both and other technologies too. Happy learning...
Update : This post is not supposed to be meant as Negative. IBM has done a great deal to Lotus Notes without which Lotus wouldn't have come this far. All am trying to convey here, IBM probably have a different strategy and may be it doesn't gel with what we think. Project Vulcan is a prime example for that kind of commitment. IMO,if we understand the technology fundamentals my take is it's not very difficult to apply and learn new technologies right? That's how i want to view and move. Life has to go on.
Long Live IBM Lotus

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